Plato's Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters

408 Pages·2013·24.62 MB·English

by  Alain Badiou

PLATO'S REPUBLIC

PLATO'S REPUBLIC
A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters, with a
Prologue and an Epilogue
ALAIN BADIOU
Translated by Susan Spitzer
cp
~x1'~.:k.~~.rg
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII~ ~IIIIIIIII~IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII~
B00881829
polity
First published in French as La République de Platon © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2012
This English edition © Polity Press, 2012
Polit y Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1U R, UK
Politv Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
Ali rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6214-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 10.5 011 12 pt Sa bon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites
referred ta in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the
publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will
remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in
any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity , visit our website: www.politybooks.com
CONTENTS
The numbers and letters in parentheses after each chapter tide (e.g.
327a) refer to a division of the text into sections, each usually about
ten lines long. Although this division owes its existence solely to
ancient methods of editing and paginating manuscripts, it has become
the traditional one, enabling readers to find their place not only in the
Greek text but also in the available translations, which include such
indications in the text - something 1 have not done.
Introduction by Kenneth Reinhard VIl
Translator's Preface XXIV
Author's Preface to the English Edition XXIX
Preface XXXI
Characters XXXVI
Prologue: The Conversation in the Villa on the Harbor
(327a-336b) 1
1 Reducing the Sophist to Silence (336b-357a) 14
2 The Young People's Pressing Questions (357a-368d) 45
3 The Origins of Society and the State (368d-376c) 63
4 The Disciplines of the Mind: Literature and Music
(376c-403c) 76
5 The Disciplines of the Body: Nutrition, Medicine, and
Physical Education (403c-412c) 93
6 Objective Justice (412c-434d) 106
7 Subjective Justice (434d-449a) 131
8 W0111en and Families (449a-471c) 148
9 What Is a Philosopher? (471c-484b) 162
10 Philosophy and Politics (484b-502c) 183
V
CONTENTS
11 What Is an Idea? (502c-521c) 197
12 From Mathematics to the Dialectic (521c-541b) 224
13 Critique of the Four Pre-COlTImunist SysteiTIS of
Government. 1: Timocracy and Oligarchy (541b-555b) 245
14 Critique of the Four Pre-Communist Systems of
Government. II: Democracy and Tyranny (555b-573b) 263
15 Justice and Happiness (573b-592b) 291
16 Poetry and Thought (592b-608b) 316
Epilogue: The Mobile Eternity of Subjects (608b-621d) 337
Notes 355
Bibliography 368
Index 371
VI
INTRODUCTION
Badiou's Sublime Translation of the Republic
Kenneth Reinhard
Alain Badiou stands, virtuaUy alone among n1ajor philosophers at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, as a self-proclaimed Platonist,
the chalnpion of what he caUs a "Platonism of the multiple." l ln an
inteIlectual genealogy that few contemporary thinkers would share,
there are, for Badiou, "onl y three crucial philosophers": Descartes,
Hegel, and above aIl, Plato.2 In a 1994 interview, Badiou describes
his privileging of Plato as a kind of "coquetry," but he insists it is a
serious coquetry.3 There is no doubt something contrarian in flirting
with Platonism today, when n10dern philosophy and critical theory
have generally agreed in denouncing it as idealism, essentialism, logo
centrisn1, or even proto-fascism; but Badiou's relationship with Plato
is more love affair than idle daUiance - provocative, perhaps, but also
a passionate attachment whose implications for his thinking continue
to unfold. As in the legend of the gateway to Plato's Academy, which
was reputed to bear the warning "let no one ignorant of geOlnetry
enter," the approach to Badiou's thinking requires a rigorous and
transformative engagement with Plato's mathematical imperative,
the only ma st strong enough to resist the siren caH of sophistry. Plato
is, for Badiou, the first philosopher tout court precisely insofar as he
is the first to establish philosophy's ontological foundation in Inath
ematics, on the one hand, and its necessarily antagonistic relationship
with sophistry, on the other. Moreover, it is from Plato that Badiou
derives his articulation of truth into four fields or sets of "proce
dures," which are distinct from philosophy but are its conditions:
science, politics, art, and 10ve.4
For Badiou, Plato is the first warrior in the eternal batde of philoso
phy against sophistry, of truth against opinion, and the progenitor
of the living idea of communism. If, as Badiou argues, sophistry is
Vil
INTRODUCTION BY KENNETH REINHARD
"a system that creates a dissymmetry of power through the general
equivalence of opinions," we might say that philosophy uses the
dissymmetry of opinions and truths to create a general equivalence
or availability of power. 5 There is no place for truth in sophistic
debates, where it will inevitably be suspected of authoritarianism.
Truth cannot be produced through the exchange of opinions, and
in the Republic the arch-sophist Thrasymachus is not convinced by
SoCt"ates' argun1ents but merely "reduced to silence." Truth is already
there, embodied in the subjective position represented by Socrates,
and Plato's dialogues, above aU the Republic, will explore and
articulate its consequences.
An unorthodox reading of Plato has been central to Badiou's
thinking, at least since his early book, The Concept of Madel, which
originated as a lecture in Althusser's seminar, just days before the
great events in Paris of May 1968. Badiou's 1988 work, Being and
Event, opens with a strongly unconventional reading of Plato's
Parmenides as a theory of "inconsistent multiplicity," irreducible to
the ontology of the One and the Many, an argument he expands in
"The Question of Being Today," published in the 1998 Briefings on
Existence. Badiou's 1989-90 seminar on Plato's Republic examines
the relationship between the philosophical concept of Truth and the
four truth procedures; and Badiou comments extensively on Plato
and mathematical "PlatonisIT1" in numerous essays throughout the
'90s.6 Plato is a recurrent touchstone in Badiou's 2006 Logics of
Worlds; and its 2009 companion, Second Manifesta far Philosophy,
culminates with a chapter on the "Platonic Idea." In recent years
Badiou has devoted three major interconnected projects to Plato: the
three years of seminars (2007-2010) entitled "For Today - Platol"7;
a forthcoming screenplay on The Life of Plata; and the translation -
or, as he caUs it at times, "hypertranslation" - into French of Plato's
Republic - translated here into living American English by Susan
Spitzer.
If a certain critique of Plato begins already with Aristotle, the
twentieth century was pervasively anti-Platonic. Many otherwise
disparate schools of thought agree in their rejection of what they caU
"Platonism." In the opening session of his 2007 seminar on Plato (as
weIl as in numerous essays and talks), Badiou describes SIX major
forms of modern anti-Platonism:
1 the vitalist anti-Platonism of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze,
who see Plato as the theorist of an unchanging ideal realm of
perfect being, hostile to the living reality of becoming. Plato,
VUI
INTRODUCTION BY KENNETH REINHARD
according to Nietzsche (perhaps the most pre-eminent among
modern anti-Platonists), is the first "priest," the first to turn life
aga in st itself, and thus one source of the metaphysical "disease" of
which we must still be cured;
2 the analytic anti-Platonism of Russell, the later Wittgenstein,
and Carnap, who associate Plato with the belief in supersensible
mathematicalobjects;
3 Marxist anti-Platonism, for which Plato is the origin of the notori
ous sensible/intelligible opposition, hence the source of idealism
and the beginning of the history of ideology. Badiou frequently
refers to this lTIode of anti-Platonism by citing the dictionary of
philosophy commissioned bYl Stalin, where Plato is defined as
"ideologue of the slave owners";
4 the existentialist anti-Platonism of Kierkegaard and Sartre, who
see Plato as subordinating the singularity of existence and the
creative negativity of non-being to eternal essences and to the
stasis of being;
5 Heideggerian anti-Platonism, according to which Plato obscures
Being itself (and thus the ontological difference between Being and
beings) by subn1itting it to the representational idea. For Heidegger,
Plato flattens the originary Greek account of truth as aletheia,
"unconcealing," into one of knowledge as correspondence;
6 the anti-Platonisrn of political philosophy, which regards Plato's
politics as "totalitarian," as closing off the free circulation of
opinions in order to assert a rigid politics, which tolerates no
dissent. Exemplary here is Karl Popper's attack on Plato in The
Open Society and Its Enemies, but Badiou also includes the n10re
"noble" example of Hannah Arendt.
Badiou argues that each of these anti-Platonisms accuses Plato of
ignoring a key elelTIent that they consider to be the very kernel of
the real: for the vitalists, "becoming"; for analytic philosophy, "lan
guage"; for Marxists, "concrete social relations"; for the existential
ists, "negativity"; for the Heideggerians, "thinking" as distinct from
mere "knowledge"; and for political philosophy, "democracy" itself.
But these objections to Plato are inconsistent with each other and do
not add up to a coherent attack or to a counter-position beyond their
shared anti-Platonism. The two notable exceptions to this general
agreement that Plato fails to address the real, both emerging from the
Maoism of the sixties, are what Badiou calls the "mystical Platonism"
of Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet and Badiou's own lTIath
ematical Platonism. MathelTIatical Platonism, according to Badiou,
IX
INTRODUCTION BY KENNETH REINHARD
is a subjective construction that begins with the thesis that there is
sornething incommensurable about aIl existing measures, something
similar to the irrational relation between a diagonal and the sides of
a square. But, unlike the exponents of nlystical Platonisl11, Badiou
insists that it is incunlbent on us to determine this non-relation, to
construct a new measure for the immeasurable; and in the extended
work along this process, Plato will be our guide.
The fact that two out of Badiou's three current projects on Plato
are themselves works of art indicates the special position Plato has
among Badiou's primary influences or "masters": for him, Plato is
the great philosopher of the Idea, of course, but he is also a powerful
literary artist in his dialogues - and, according to legend, the author
of several tragedies in his youth.8 It has frequently been pointed out
that, despite Plato's rather extreme criticisms of mimetic poetry and
theater in the Republic, that work itself is clearly one of great poetic
and dramatic art. Badiou's translation of the Republic emphasizes
and enhances these literary qualities by refashioning Plato's sketchy
interlocutors - for the most part bobble-headed yes-men who barely
interrupt the relentless stream of Socratic discourse - into richly
imagined characters, rel11arkably alive, complicated, and passionate.9
Badiou's theatricalization of the Republic also involves the redistri
bution of comUlents from Socrates to his interlocutors, so that what
in Plato is a series of statements in Badiou becomes more dialogic,
more representative of conflicting desires. And, while Socrates and
his young disciples discuss the 1110St serious questions of truth, justice,
and cOl11munisnl, the mood of their discourse shifts rapidly from
excitement to boredom, fronl melancholia to elation, from hilarity to
frustration, and from petty rivalry to earnest collaboration. It is as if
the austere situation of a play by Beckett were inhabited by characters
by Brecht. At one point in Badiou's translation Socrates remarks: "1
had a calling to become a comic actor [. ..] but 1 preferred the theater
of philosophy." Something similar could be said a bout Badiou,
who began his career as a novelist and later became a playwright.
Moreover, Badiou's literary works are often based on a certain kind
of "translation." His six plays (two tragedies, The Red Scarf and
Incident at Antioch, and the four Ahmed comedies) imitate draI11aS
by Aristophanes, Molière, and Claudel, transposing elements of char
acter and plot into novel situations and liberally sampling fragments
and at times entire passages of text. Although Badiou's translation
of the Republic is the most sustained presentation to date of his
philosophical relationship with Plato, it should also be considered a
central part of his literary or dramatic oeuvre - a sort of "Platonic
x